FSF aims for partnership with hardware manufacturers

Boston, MA—March 1, 2007—The Free Software Foundation
(FSF) today released a paper entitled, “The
road to hardware free from restrictions”, detailing ways
major hardware manufacturers with power in the market can work with
the free software community to establish a “mutually beneficial
relationship.”

Peter Brown, FSF executive director, said, “With the growing
utilization of free software and the rejection of Microsoft's Vista, large
vendors like HP, Dell, Lenovo and Sun have the opportunity and responsibility
to acknowledge the market for hardware suitable for free software
users—hardware that meets ethical requirements for user freedom, privacy
and security. We hope that this paper will focus attention on what needs to get
done in the coming months.”

A draft of the paper was first sent on January 10, 2007 to HP and Sun
Microsystems for their comment. Since then, several related developments have
demonstrated that the ideas in “The road to hardware free from
restrictions” are widely held within the technology community.

Kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman's open offer to all manufacturers for
free Linux kernel driver development has generated a sizable response. Dell's
recent solicitation of customer feedback was met primarily with proposals to
make all Dell machines optionally available without Microsoft Windows,
replacing it with either no operating system or with a choice of GNU/Linux
distributions. Suggestions for Dell to support coreboot and to build their
laptops with hardware fully supported by free software drivers were also
popular choices.

In the paper, the Free Software Foundation expresses its eagerness to
build on this momentum by assisting hardware vendors interested in
making the recommended changes, and it encourages vendors to take a
fresh look at this largely unexplored opportunity.

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting
computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer
programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom)
software—particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux
variants—and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps
to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use
of software. Their web site, located at www.fsf.org, is an important source of
information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support their work can be made at
http://donate.fsf.org. They are
headquartered in Boston, MA, USA.

Press Contact: For more information about this announcement or to
schedule an interview, please contact Peter Brown or John Sullivan
at +1-617-542-5942 or pr@fsf.org.